Yesterday, I faced an is­sue send­ing a PDF file through my NextCloud provider. I don't like to self-host some­thing so crit­i­cal be­cause it has my con­tacts, cal­en­dar, and files. Unfortunately, my cloud host provider runs ver­sion 18 whereas it ap­pears to be fixed in ver­sion 19.

Previously, I had used Firefox Send for this but it had been shut down tem­porar­ily due to con­cerns around mal­ware be­ing sent us­ing the ser­vice. I asked the Fosstodon com­mu­nity for an al­ter­na­tive as I was un­happy not be­ing able to pass­word-pro­tect or set an ex­pi­ra­tion date on WeTransfer or Dropbox.

Very quickly, I dis­cov­ered Lufi. I like the user-ex­pe­ri­ence as tried on a pub­lic in­stance, and will self host it for sure. Even more so now that Firefox Send has been of­fi­cially shut down, as many in the pri­vacy com­mu­nity pre­dicted would hap­pen.

I had al­ways de­sired a con­tri­bu­tion to the MDN doc­u­men­ta­tion. It is a fan­tas­tic re­source that has helped me im­mensely through the years.

The idea that some­thing I con­tribute can ben­e­fit hun­dreds or thou­sands of de­vel­op­ers in mak­ing bet­ter in­formed de­ci­sions gives me so much joy.

This fi­nally came true to­day with a small im­ple­men­ta­tion note around how Firefox for Android cur­rently doesn't han­dle a datalist due to a re­gres­sion in­tro­duced in v79.

My ex­pe­ri­ence was very pleas­ant and rather quick. I would love to do this again! 😊

On my sta­tic site, I use Forestry CMS to write ar­ti­cles. There's also Netlify CMS (not af­fil­i­ated to Netlify), but I find Forestry to have a re­mark­ably bet­ter UI/UX. That's my rec­om­men­da­tion. The ini­tial setup can be te­dious, but for a sim­ple blog, it might not be.

I had been us­ing the Gmail client on my Android phone be­cause the user ex­pe­ri­ence is not com­pro­mised in any sig­nif­i­cant way, at least speak­ing rel­a­tively. I would like to use a FOSS client, but I've found too many fo­cus on func­tion­al­ity and not de­sign and/​or UX.

Still, Gmail has one ma­jor prob­lem though: on ac­counts work­ing through IMAP, you lose the Swipe to Archive ges­ture. This is pretty an­noy­ing as I've got two ac­counts work­ing through IMAP. They re­ceive a bulk of my ac­tion­able email and my de­fault ac­tion is to archive email. This is a prob­lem.

Finally, I de­cided to in­stall and try Outlook. It lets me cus­tomize the swipe ac­tions and doesn't lock me out from a first-party ex­pe­ri­ence just be­cause it isn't a Microsoft/Outlook email ac­count. In fact, it feels bet­ter de­signed than Gmail and I think I'm go­ing to stick with it.

Healthline.com ex­plains per­fec­tion­ism (emphasis mine):

People with per­fec­tion­ism hold them­selves to im­pos­si­bly high stan­dards. They think what they do is never good enough. […] Eventually, it can also lead you to stop try­ing to suc­ceed. Even mild cases can in­ter­fere with your qual­ity of life, af­fect­ing your per­sonal re­la­tion­ships, ed­u­ca­tion, or work.

This is the kind of stuff I think many of us can iden­tify with. In my time work­ing on Celestial so far, I've had at least three break pe­ri­ods where I didn't want to get back to work­ing on it. Each time, I thought it was over. Because it was ru­ined. Much worse, there was a voice telling me I ru­ined it and I'm not a good enough de­vel­oper to pull this off.

So, let me ad­mit some­thing: cur­rently, the unit tests are a lit­tle be­hind, there are a cou­ple of bugs with the Micropub server, some of the JavaScript is not quite DRY, a11y is not where I want it to be, the CSS is, though based on BEM, hardly per­fectly main­tained over the last cou­ple of months.

And that's okay.

I'm fight­ing this voice.

I have to.

I might go to https://​events.in­dieweb.org/​2020/​09/​vir­tual-home­brew-web­site-club-in­dian-stan­dard-time-uW98BxK­sqlUa .